Conventionally, the memory architecture of mobile terminals such as mobile telephones includes various types of memory such as graphics RAM used by a graphics processing unit (GPU), buffer memory used by a digital signal processor (DSP), and video RAM of a liquid crystal display (LCD) controller, in addition to random access memory (RAM), which is primarily accessed by a central processing unit (CPU).
As a method of accessing such types of memory, for example, a technique has been disclosed that performs management related to accessing memory by a thread that is run to access memory by application software (hereinafter, “app”) (for example, refer to Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2008-108089). A process that is executed by a CPU is managed in units of threads.
Nonetheless, with the technique above, when configuration is such that a thread that manages memory access can be executed by an arbitrary CPU, an exclusive control process has to be added to prevent contention that occurs consequent to concurrent access. Consequently, a problem of increased overhead arises.